


If You Must Wait

by lady_mab



Category: In the Flesh (TV), Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: Gen, i was dared to do it, more characters show up later, so i did, will add them as I go, zombies galore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 21:43:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2483465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_mab/pseuds/lady_mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Johannes Cabal inadvertently causes the Uprising, and aspires to fix it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you must leave, Leave as though fire burns under your feet  
> If you must speak, Speak every word as though it were unique  
> If you must die, sweetheart Die knowing your life was my life's best part

Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, was not a swearing man by nature. If he did feel the urge to do so, it would generally be in a long-dead language to avoid insulting a person's sensitivity. He was also not prone to mistakes, generally being the one to repair them than to cause them. 

But as he stood in the cemetery of the decidedly out-of-the-way village of Roarton, and undead after very undead climbed their way out of coffins, he could only manage one response to properly sum up his emotions. 

“Well, _shit_.” 

All he had wanted was information from one of the interred, and brought enough serum for only one. That was how he operated, after all: Minimalistic to the point of brevity. A simple wardrobe (all black), a simple way of speaking (as little as possible), a simple weapon (a .577 Webley; one shot, and you were more than certainly dead). He had a course of action and followed it with as little deviation as possible. 

Go to the cemetery. Dig up one measly body. Ask it a few questions, kill it again, and be on his way. No harm done. 

Instead, he had a full on _rising_ on his hands, and this was the exact opposite of what he wanted. 

So he swore again, this time with a vehement, “Fucking shit,” and immediately set to rewriting his plan with one course of action: Retreat. Find a safe distance and attempt to undo what he somehow caused. 

Cabal knew, in the very least, that this was no Ereshkigal Working, though the woman that first climbed through the dirt on his left made him question it for a brief moment. He researched the formula inside and out, studied the words of the spell until they fell from his tongue as easily as his native German. He researched every possibility, every loophole his considerable knowledge of such things could allow him to conceivably consider. This was not a variation of the Ereshkigal Working, and thus, he was safe if he wanted to bugger out of town and take a nap. 

He was also safe if he just wanted to bugger out of town in general. It wasn’t his place to have to warn the people of Roarton, even if he was the one that caused this general upsurge of undead. Only having a conscious weighed heavy on his thoughts and he, inevitably, felt it necessary. 

Behind him, not too far away, the clock tower struck midnight and Cabal heaved an arduous sigh with the knowledge of what he had to do. Snapping his notebook shut and slipping it into his Gladstone, he gathered his belongings and gripped them tightly in his hands. 

And then he did what any sensible man in his situation might do, standing alone in a graveyard in the middle of the night surrounded by the rising dead: Johannes Cabal ran.


	2. Chapter 2

Cabal had returned to the hotel on the opposite end of town well before the zombies made it very far out of the cemetery, and could at least pretend to have been asleep by the time everyone else woke. 

There was much screaming and several guns going off, to which he dragged himself out of bed for and looked appropriately put upon by the noise. The hardest part was pretending like the attack was a surprise. “What do you mean the dead are rising?” he had asked when the hotel owner pounded on his door to warn him. “Dead don’t just _rise_.” He added a disgruntled jab at backwater villages being more trouble than they’re worth under his breath. 

Apparently he pulled off ‘scandalized city bloke who just had his reasoning for not visiting out of the way villages validated and I shall tell all of my friends of this atrocity’ convincingly enough, because the man murmured an apology and hurried away. 

Cabal retreated back into his room, closed the door, and set the chair beneath the handle for good measure. He spent the rest of the evening sitting on the edge of his bed with his Webley in his lap and scribbling furious notes into his notebook.

* * *

A week had actually passed since when Johannes Cabal originally checked into hotel and when he went to visit the graveyard. He had learned the hard way, on several occasions, that people in small villages were oft more suspicious if a stranger showed up and disappeared over the course of one evening and then a grave was disturbed or a book stolen. It did give rise to an increased percentage of torch-bearing mobs hot on his trail. 

They were less suspicious, oddly so, if a person knocked about town for some time and had a convincing story to his presence. (If anyone asked, and only one was brave enough, he was here visiting the grave of a close family friend, who had died some years previous, and while he was here, why shouldn’t he enjoy the respite from the city?) 

Roarton was like any other back-end sort of town: backwater, backwards thinking. These were people that were born and raised there, and settled down again, and never left the valley. Ever. 

But while he could try to convince himself that he was doing these people a huge favor by raising the dead -- and thus forcing them out of the mind-breaking sameness of their daily lives -- he still felt a large degree of responsibility for his actions. Namely he was inflicting death upon them as much as he was the desire to up and leave. No amount of reasoning could bring Cabal to admit the fact that it was a _job well done_ and _I’ll just be on my way then_.


	3. Chapter 3

Morning dawned and it found Cabal already dressed and checked out of his hotel. He made sure to add in some more surly muttering under his breath about his poor friend interred in an unholy place such as this. 

By the time any suspicions over him might be raised, he would be long gone, anyway. To find an end to this, certainly, but also to study in peace and at his own leisure because he certainly had a lot to consider and didn’t want bitter old villagers and brain hungry undead clawing at him. 

He needed one last look at the graveyard. It had been about six hours since the dead clambered out of their graves and made their best effort to return to the land of the living. Most should have cleared out by then, if he knew anything about zombies (and he knew plenty), and the ones remaining, he could take care of. 

Cabal picked his way down to the graveyard. Every house was dark and somber, though he could see the twitch of curtains at the sound of his footsteps. Bodies of freshly dead and dead-again were strewn hither and thither, and he frowned at the mess of things. “Verdammt Zombies,” he sighed, stepping over one particularly gruesome corpse. “Verdammt Tölpel.” 

The sun didn’t bother making an appearance on his walk through town and into the graveyard. That didn’t matter -- it wouldn’t have made a difference. It might have even mocked the events that had happened the night before. He kept his smoked blue glasses ticked into the breast pocket of his jacket. 

The dirt and dead grass of the cemetery clung to his shoes, replacing what had been mostly scraped off the night before in a last-minute fit of removing any trace of his presence here. (He later realized it wasn’t necessary, because no matter where one seemed to go, dirt would cling to their shoes.) He moved with purpose and ease to the headstone he wanted, having visited it several times in the past week. He even had a few flower stems clenched between two fingers, as little contact as possible, to place at the grave. 

He glared down at the headstone, reviewing all the details he already knew by heart. The man had only been dead six years, and he hadn’t even been brought down by an angry lynch mob like many of his profession still tended to find themselves on the fleeing end from. He had simply drank too much over the course of his life. Cabal muttered some angry curses in a long-dead language and kicked the headstone. 

What with his one lead still buried and a zombie uprising on his hands, this avenue was an overall _dead_ end. 

(He felt even worse about the whole ordeal after realizing what a terrible pun that had been.) 

“Nasty mess that we’ve found ourselves in, eh?” 

Cabal’s head jerked up and he found himself now glaring at a frumpy old man with a cigarette clenched between his teeth. The man stood in front of a grave two rows up, though there was absolutely no pity or remorse on his face. Clearly, the grave he stood over was no one important to him. 

“Yes,” Cabal said, with an air that did not invite further conversation. “It is.” 

The man didn’t pick up on it -- simply took a drag and exhaled an angry lungful of smoke. “Mass uprisin’ of the dead. No discrimination there, huh? Even ungrateful bastards--” Here, he jabbed a finger in the direction of the grave he stood over, though Cabal wasn’t too sure how conscious the movement even was-- “get a second chance at stumblin about.” 

For a moment, Cabal had the horrifying thought that he might have found someone who was a zombie sympathizer, albeit with an ‘air of taste’ about who got to be a zombie. 

But then the man ended his tirade with, “Filthy rotting bastards,” and spat at the grave lying in shambles before his feet. “They all gotta be killed. For good this time.” 

"Hm," Cabal said -- not too keen on agreeing with this man though yes, they did need to be put back down. There were cleaner, more efficient ways than simply 'killing'. 

The man crossed over an undisturbed grave to stand a headstone away from Johannes and held out a hand. "The name is Bill Macy."

"Trevor Carrow," Cabal said, not making a move to return the gesture. He kept his hands locked behind his back. 

Granted, it didn’t need to be said that ‘Trevor Carrow’ was a man freshly buried some few months past for being a zombie sympathizer and just generally obnoxious. Maybe he cursed himself with the choice of name. 

“Not from around here, are ya?” 

Great. He came to investigate and got stuck with a chatty yokel. “No. Leeds.” 

“Ah, Nice this time of year, issit?” 

“Not particularly.” It was February. Nowhere was nice. 

“What brings you to Roarton? Save the zombie apocalypse.” Macy chuckled dryly around the cigarette butt still perched precariously between his lips. 

Resigned to at least ten more minutes of boring chatter, Cabal simply gestured to the grave he stood in front of. “Family friend.”

Macy leaned in too close to read the stone facing. “Leon Morris, eh? Good man, nasty habit. Shame.” Regardless of if he meant necromancy or drunkenness, it was indeed a ‘nasty habit’. The man continued on despite Cabal’s silence. “Good thing he didn’t come back in this whole mess.” 

He refrained from making any sort of reaction -- merely stared down at the words carved in stone. ( _Leon Morris. 1942-2004. No mysteries in death save those we are afraid of._ ) (God, what a pretentious arsehole.) 

A chorus of yelling and a smattering of gunshots rose up from the distant roofs of the town. Cabal tensed, uncertain of what sort of reaction was expected of him. 

Bill Macy leapt to action far faster than Cabal originally gave him credit for. The man grabbed an old rifle that had seen better days from where it rested against a headstone. “Best get out of here as quick as you can, mate, if you know what’s good for you. This is a Roarton problem, and we’ll be able to solve it.” With a militaristic nod, he stalked off through the disturbed earth toward the town. 

Cabal watched him go. _What a confident and self-righteous man,_ he thought. _He’ll probably be dead within the week._

With a final shrug, he moved on at a slow pace between the headstones. Two to his left, where the woman first clawed her way out of the damp earth mere hours before, he paused to read. Amy Dyer, 1988-2009. Epitaph a handful of over quoted lines from a Dylan Thomas poem. 

“Hm,” he said to the silence. 

Curiosity suddenly taking over, Cabal crossed to the grave Billy Macy had stood in front of. Kieren Walker, 1991-2009. And while two was by no means enough to draw a conclusion from, he moved from plot to overturned plot, and his stomach formed a cold knot of realization. 

Everyone that rose had died in 2009, the new year having passed a mere five weeks before. 

He found himself back in front of Leon Morris’ grave once again. 1942-2004 stared mockingly back. Huffing out an indignant _Well_ , Cabal pulled out his notebook from his overcoat pocket and jotted a few things down before fetching his Gladstone. 

He would have to catch the next train out and get right to work. There was a loophole somewhere in that spell that he had overlooked, and he had to find it -- fast.


	4. Chapter 4

At the train station, where he had left his suitcase with the porter, Cabal bought his return ticket to Leeds, from where he would shed the identity of Trevor Carrow and catch another train back to Norfolk. 

The porter’s radio chattered away in increasingly frantic tones, though he couldn’t understand from where he sat on the bench. As it was, it took several shouts of “Sir! Sir! Mister Carrow!” before Cabal snapped out of his mire of thoughts to realize the porter was waving at him. 

He heaved himself to his feet and stepped closer -- resisting the urge to shoot the man for being a nuisance. “Yes?” 

“It’s not just here anymore, sir! It’s everywhere! All across the world!” The man was blabbering, but the cold knot in Cabal’s stomach hadn’t lessened after leaving the graveyard with a plan of action. It only turned from an uncomfortable chill to ice at these words. 

“What is?” he demanded, if only to force a coherent answer. 

“The undead! They’re rising everywhere!” 

Quite certain that his stomach had descended to a level of hell he had not yet visited, Cabal muttered something that might have been a ‘thank you’ before tottering back to the bench. A complex mess of reactions overwhelmed him as he dropped down -- just barely making it onto the wooden seat. 

The first, understandably, was the resounding dread that _I did this._

The second was, inexplicably, _I shot Trevor Carrow last year. This really is a curse._

The third, which didn’t dawn on him until he stepped onto the train and the doors closed behind him with a hum, was the one that almost made him break. 

_My brother died last year._


End file.
